Another “How was this done?” (Pre-Photoshop)

I have enjoyed posting some mages lately from the 80’s. Todays image is from the early 90’s shot, also on chrome film with NO retouch, straight scan.

This photograph was taken about 45 minutes after sunset. In Norway the sun sets very slowly and it takes about an hour at this time of the year before it gets dark. We call this extra time of light after the sun is down “the blue hour’.

I had taken pictures of the young lady (owner of a model agency) in the evening sun, but didn’t feel I got what I wanted, so I’m glad that I had a tungsten light available and the blue hour. The background is a famous sculpture.

So what is the difficulty here? It is dark, I want movement, no fast films was good enough. I was loving the Konicachrome R100 film for this kind of work at the time and that is what I used in this image. Exposure is 1/15 sec @ Nikkor 105 mm @f2.5 on a Nikon F3. The lamp lighting her up is a Kaiser 250w, 24volt tungsten lamp. The battery was so low, Im probably only getting around 125watts?

The HOW question? How to you get her sharp moving while the water from the fountain is blurred because of movement???

I remember being very excited when I saw this exposure on the light table with my magnifier, the way we viewed them back from the lab in those days. I got the ONE sharp image I needed! I shot many to get this one ( almost like digital :-))) The only thing we did retouch in print was the one backlight from a truck in the background as you can see in this untouched scan.

PS. I will tell you already tomorrow afternoon US MST how it is done, again old students might remember the answer? If so, let the people that have never been told get a go at this please.

PSS. Wednesday Dec.30, 2009. The answer to the trivia “How was this done?”

If you throw a rock straight up in the air there is a split second when it stands still before falling back to earth. I used this principle to get her sharp with the 1/15 sec exposure and capture the movement of the water. She swung her dress up and down and I caught the very moment (in one of the many tries and exposures) when the skirt stopped to turn back down.